Defiling Torture
Techniques Developed By:
Che Guevara
The Hand of Castro
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IS THIS WHAT WE WANT FOR ELIAN?
TORTURE IN CASTRO'S CUBA
Geneva, Switzerland, February 23, 1988
(Address of Ambassador Armando Valladares', Chief of the United State's Delegation to the United Nations Human Rights' Commission.)
Mr. Chairman; I am not a career diplomat, and I am not an expert on the technical aspects of this organism. I will not speak in a detailed manner on the reports and topics submitted under point 10. There will be other interventions during which we will listen to opinions on those important matters.
Mr. Chairman, today I want to speak about torture, about what it means for a human being to be tortured, to be humiliated, or what may be even worse, to watch a friend, a companion, or a relative being tortured.
As many of you know, I spent twenty-two years in prison for political reasons. Perhaps, I am the only delegate in this Commission who has spent such a long time in prison, although there are several persons here who have known in their own flesh the meaning of torture. I do not care about their political ideology, and I offer to you my embrace of solidarity, from tortured to tortured.
I had many friends in prison. One of them, Roberto López Chávez, was just a kid. He went on a hunger strike to protest the abuses. The guards denied him water, Roberto lay on the floor of his punishment cell, agonizing, deliriously asking for water. water… The soldiers came in and asked him: "Do you want water?… The they took out their members and urinated in his mouth, on his face… He died the following day. We were cellmates; when he died I felt something wither inside me.
I recall when they kept me in a punishment cell, naked, with several fractures on one leg which never received medical care; today, those bones remain jammed up together and displaced. One of the regular drills among the guards was to stand on the steel mesh ceiling and throw at my face buckets full of urine and excrement.
Mr. Chairman, I know the taste of the urine and the excrement of other men… that practice does not leave marks; marks are left by beatings with steel rods and by bayonet thrusts. My head is still covered with scars and you can feel the cracks.
But, what can inflict more damage to human dignity, the urine and excrements thrown all over your face or a bayonet's blow? Which is the appropriate article for the discussion of this subject? Under which technical point does it fall? Under what batch of papers, numbers, lines and bars should we include this trampling of human dignity? For me, and for innumerable other human beings around the world. The violation of human rights was not a matter of reports, of negotiated resolutions, of elegant and diplomatic rhetoric, for us was a daily suffering.
For me (it meant) eight thousand days of hunger, of systematic beatings, of hard labor, of solitary confinement, of cells with steel-planked windows and doors, of solitude.
Eight thousand days of struggling to prove that I was a human being. Eight thousand days of proving that my spirit could triumph over exhaustion and pain. Eight thousand days of testing my religious convictions, my faith, of fighting the hate my atheist jailers were trying to instill in me with each bayonet thrust, fighting so that hate would not flourish in my heart. Eight thousand days of struggling so that I would not become like them, rejecting torture as a mean to fight, forcing myself to forgive, rejecting the thoughts of revenge, reprisal and cruelty.
And when cruelty is extended to one's family, does not it become a means of torture? My father is an elderly man, he is very ill; he too suffered political imprisonment. Because he is my father he is not allowed to leave the country. For two years now, the authorities are preying on him as reprisal for my activities. They do not beat him, but they tell him that he will be leaving the country on the following day. My father travels to the Capital full of illusions. And when he is about to board the plane, they tell him that it was a bureaucratic error that he most goes back to his hometown. They do this to him every two or five weeks. They are damaging his mind, in the same manner that they destroyed my sister's, who is currently undergoing psychiatric treatment.
Occasionally, the world of the grieving has poetic traits. I think it was a book by Victor Frankel, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, where I read that in the midst of the total disheartenment in which they lived, they were kept alive by a violinist. A fellow prisoner invariably played a classical piece on his violin at sundown and they all turned silent to listen him. That violin, pulling notes from its strings in the midst of their suffering was a secret ray of hope.
Bertold Brecht, the German playwright, tells a similar story in a moving monologue. It tells of two Jewish teenagers imprisoned at a hard-labor camp. They are a girl and a boy, and a fence keeps them apart. They have never spoken but their eyes crossed and they are in love. Daily, at the fence that separates them, each one leaves a flower pulled among the weeds as a testimony of their love. One day, her flower is missing. The following day his is gone. Hopelessness killed them both.
The arbitrariness of tyrants reduces their victims to the condition of mere beasts… dehumanizes them. In the same manner that animals are tied down, locked up or beaten without explanation, totalitarian regimes treat their adversaries as beasts. And there are times, when one is being treated like a beast, that the only thing that saves us from the most degrading humiliation, the only thing that keeps us firm, is to know that somewhere else there is another soul that loves us, that respect us and that is fighting for the return of the dignity that has been snatched from us.
I had the luck, Mr. Chairman, of having people who was fighting for my freedom, and of having my wife who went from country to country, knocking on every door and on every conscience, on people and governments, pressuring them for my freedom. But the majority of those who suffer the violation of their human rights have one sole hope the international community. Against all hope, they only think of you, they only hope in you.
Unfortunately, I have some first-hand experience on these grieves. Many years, maybe twenty years ago, a political prisoner named Fernando López Toro came near my cell and told me in a disheartened voice that what hurt him the most about our torments, the beatings inflicted upon us, the hunger we suffered, was to think that our sacrifice was useless. Fernando was not broken by the pain but by the futility of the pain. I tried to explain to him that in the face of total ignorance and indifference from the rest of the world, our suffering still had an ethical sense and carried valuable transcendence, but I think I did not get through to him. A few years later, prisons apart, I heard that Fernando could not hold on any longer and took his own life.
Months later I learned the details. Because of other inmates in his cell were too weak and distraught, and practically annihilated because of the physical cruelties inflicted upon them, they stood motionless, and Fernando was able to climb up on his bunk bed, wrap a dirty rag around his neck, cut it open with a piece of sharpened metal, with his fingers feeling for the jugular vein; then with one stroke, slashed it. He died within minutes.
It is always said that his jailers were directly responsible for his death, but I know that Fernando was also the victim of general apathy and lack of solidarity, of silence, of that terrible soundless universe where so many worthy men and women continue to die in this century of horrors and tramplings.
Torture and violations of human rights, come from where might, are an aggression against all mankind and we must fight back with all our strength. There lies, precisely, the efficacy of our message.
International denouncements achieve their objective. They are the only means of pressuring the torturers, the only means to force them to free prisoners for the sake of public image, to save face, to be more careful, to transgressing less.
Denouncing the criminal does not guarantee his punishment but it may deter him from continuing the practice. We must raise our voices without fear and use all resources available to defend the persecuted, the tortured of the world. We must shout their suffering for them and fearlessly denounce their henchmen.
We must enter the cell of every Fernando López del Toro in the world, embrace him in solidarity and tell them to their faces, "do not take your life, there are men of good will who are standing by you, your dignity as a human being will prevail. In remembrance, there will always be a flower, the notes of a violin, the saddened voice of the so-called brothers who grief with you and defend you. Look, you are not a beast. Do not take your life. Freedom will never disappear from the face of the Earth."
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
(Armando Valladares, is a Cuban poet released (because of international pressure and the personal intervention of French President, Francois Mitterand) from Castro's political dungeons in 1982 after serving 22 years of a 30 year sentence for publicly opposing the Communist take over of the Cuban Revolution. President Reagan made him U.S. Ambassador to the United Nation's Commission on Human Rights. His Memoirs, Against all Hope, was a best seller in the United States and around the world and has been translated to numerous languages.)
Valladares vividly expressed how much it meant the international reaction to the Cuban political martyrdom: "During those years, with the purpose of forcing us to abandon our religious beliefs and to demoralize us, the Cuban Communist indoctrinators repeatedly used the statements made by some representatives of the American Christian churches. Every time a pamphlet was published in U.S., every time a clergyman would write an article in support of Castro's dictatorship, a translation would be given to us, and that was far worse for the Christian political prisoners than the beatings or the hunger. Incomprehensible to us, while we waited for the embrace of solidarity from our brothers in Christ, those who were embraced were our tormentors."
The World Council of Churches and well as Rev. Jesse Jackson and members of U.S. Congress as Jose Serrano, Sheila Jackson Lee, Maxin Waters, and Charles Rangel's, shameful support of the Cuban regime makes them accomplices of Fidel Castro's crimes against humanity.
Welcome to FR!
Thanks for the post. To read an extraordinary, brief work smuggled by Valladares himself out of Cuba upon his release from prison; and to understand a bit more about the systematic persecution of Christians in Cuba; and the nature of the Marxist "Liberation Theology"; see the Free Republic link below:
A Cuba Moment, No. 8: The Fear of God.
Anyone want more of this harrowing story? I highly recommend Against All Hope, Valladares' tale of imprisonment, courage, and ultimate vindication. I challenge anyone to read this and still claim that Cuba is a workers' paradise.
The American "clergy" who have, past and present, offered deceitful apologia for Castro's Cuba, are the Liberation Theologists -- and yes they do have an agenda.
I recall when there was a letter signed by a group of American Representatives and Senators to Fidel Castro asking for my freedom and for humane treatment. I noticed a slight difference in the way I was treated. For the first time in years they allowed me to take a little bit of sun for a few days. After the effects of this letter vanished, I went back to where I was before. I think it's important to keep up this pressure campaign from abroad because it's things like this that finally helped obtain my own freedom . . . .
--Armando Valladares
Flagged for you.
Bump!
This man knows.
Against All Hope : The Prison Memoirs of Armando Valladares
Flagged.
bp
A friend of mine was with US State Dept "Interests section" in Havana for a couple of years and reported privately that Castro's jails are the worst he's ever seen -- he spent 20 years in Latin America-- degredation of prisoners leaves them total wrecks for life even after years in USA. He was able to take out a fair number of political prisoners...they had not worn clothes for years, had been humiliated beyond endurance. Some had gone insane. This was within last 10 years. It has not improved.
BTTT
I recall when they kept me in a punishment cell, naked, with several fractures on one leg which never received medical care; today, those bones remain jammed up together and displaced. One of the regular drills among the guards was to stand on the steel mesh ceiling and throw at my face buckets full of urine and excrement.
Mr. Chairman, I know the taste of the urine and the excrement of other men… that practice does not leave marks; marks are left by beatings with steel rods and by bayonet thrusts. My head is still covered with scars and you can feel the cracks.
But, what can inflict more damage to human dignity, the urine and excrements thrown all over your face or a bayonet's blow?
Defiling Torture
Techniques Developed By:
Che Guevara
The Hand of Castro
Has anyone learned whether Castro has Guevara's left or right hand on display at the Museum of the Revolution in Havana? Better, since both amputated hands were returned to Cuba by the Bolivians, if one hand is on display, where does Castro keep the other? Under his pillow?
And the left wing loves their Castro.
"The World Council of Churches and well as Rev. Jesse Jackson and members of U.S. Congress as Jose Serrano, Sheila Jackson Lee, Maxin Waters, and Charles Rangel's, shameful support of the Cuban regime makes them accomplices of Fidel Castro's crimes against humanity."
Absolutely! And I'll say it again for the umpteenth time. Maxime Waters is a lying hypocrite. When she went on shows such a Larry King, Rivera Live (more like "Rivera braindead"), etc. her voiceferous support for the return of Elian to Cuba was premised on more than just naive liberalism. In 1998 she sent a letter to Castro asking him to continue to offer political asylum to Blank Panther Joanne Chesimard who had fled to Cuba after being charged and later convicted of (in absentia) murdering a police officer in 1973. She has been aiding and abetting a known felon - itself a felonious offence. When will someone cause an information to be sworn charging her with obstruction of justice? (Source for the above - Christopher Caldwell, 'Lazaro Gonzalez, American Hero' The Weekly Standard.
thanks, and bump
sorrowful bump.
Armando Valladares: A Firsthand Account of Child Abuse, Castro Style (Wall Street Journal, Friday, May 12, 2000).
Thanks for the flag.....
best regards....Covenantor
yeah -- it's chilling, thanks for the link. h'mm, does anyone have joan brown campbell's address? I looked for it before on her web site...how about if she's confronted with these horrible accounts?
Thanks for the fyi Ironword (ro)
Valladares' experience is a true testament to the triumph of the human spirit...
Thanks Ironword.
Cordially,
It is incredible, isn't it, the barbarity that occurs on a daily basis only 90 miles off our coast.
http://www.prop1.org/protest/guatemal/guatlet.htm
Turns out that you don't have to travel beyond US borders to find out about the barbarity that men are capable of...sample this: http://www.soaw.org/grads/guat-not.html
Does anyone in here notice our house is made of glass? Please stop casting stones.
veeman~~Here is a very interesting article about Cuban torture techniques which I am sure you will find delightful.
I was reading this morning that Castro released a political prisoner early....keep up the hope.
Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, said it well: "One can only judge a society after entering its prisons."
Archbishop of San Antonio, Patrick Flores, was denied access to ministering the Cuban political prisoners during his visit to the Island-prison. Neither were allowed the entrance to Castro's dungeons the Relator of the United Nations as ordered by the Human Rights Commission of that world organization, nor the Red Cross International, and all the others International Human Rights organizations.
In Paris, on April 11, 1986, Resistance International organized a Nuremberg type tribunal composed of world renown personalities, mostly European socialists, some of them sympathizers of the Cuban Revolution, to judge Castro's crimes.
Among the members of the tribunal were Jorge Semprún, Spanish writer, ex-prisoner of Buchenwald and now Minister of Culture in the Spanish socialist government; René Tavernier, President of the French "Pen Club"; Bernard Stasi, member of the French Parliament; Haing Ngor, Cambodian actor, winner of the Oscar for the "Killing Fields"; Bernard-Henry Levi, French philosopher; Marie Madelain Fourcade, heroine of the French Resistance; Leon Boubien, jurist; Monique Garnier Lancon, Vice-President of the European Security Institute; Martin Gray, writer and survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and Treblinca; Osmund Faremo, member of the Norwegian Parliament and President of the Inter-parliamentary Caucus of Norway; Pascal Bruckner, writer; Yves Montand, French actor; Jean Francois Ravel, philosopher. The witnesses were twelve former Cuban political prisoners.
The Jury concluded that:" the common practice in Cuba is: arbitrary arrests, sentences by military tribunals without public audience or defense, interrogations lasting for several days with beatings, wounding, tortures, internment in forced labor camps without enough food, without dress and without medical care, suffering promiscuity from the common prisoners. It was considered very grave the imprisonment of boys as young as nine years old and young adolescents exposed to the worse tortures and to the promiscuity of the prisons. Furthermore, as it had been proven, the methods used to obtain confessions bring to our mind the methods used by Hitler in the German concentration camps: suffocation by submergence, mutilation, etc. in addition to methods of intellectual terrorism used to force the prisoners to abandon their principles. Particularly grave is the practice of biological experiments on prisoners by Russian physicians."
They concluded: "The crimes of ignoring the reality of the Nazi concentration camps, as it happened during de Second World War, should not be repeated. To do it again will be to become accomplices of those crimes." (Lumiere Sur Cuba, Internationale de la Resistance, 102 Avenue des Champs Elysées, 75008, Paris)
Unfortunately there is an abysmal ignorance with respect to the essence of Communist regimes and many people do not want to listen about the true Stalinist character of the Cuban government. Meanwhile, the leftist controlled media and Castro's pawns in the Congress, keep disinforming the American people and parroting the Cuban regime propaganda.
I am not a career diplomat, and I am not an expert on the technical aspects of this organism
Organism? Bertolt Brecht? Finally some "truth" here, if inadvertently. Arm yourselves, the Borg is coming soon to a theatre near you. Mack still got his knife? Crockett got his bowie, that's for sure. Caucasian chalk circle anyone? S&W R.I.P.
Thanks, Mare -- do you think joan has seen this? Let's give her a bump on this.
Over 300,000 men, women and children have suffered political imprisonment in 241 concentration camps and prisons during Castro's 41 year of brutal tyrany.
Over 2,000,000 political exiles.
Over 54,000 deaths due to political causes, including 12,486 people executed by firing squad.
In Cuba there are 54,000 children jailed in 73 prisons for minors.
35,150 women imprisoned in 27 prisons for women.
International pressure sometimes help in procuring the freedom of a political prisoner, but the opression in Cuba continues unabated.
Certainly, under the Clinton administration we have witnessed brutal violations of human rights that you can only expect to be perpetrated under a totalitarian regime. Waco and the lawless assault of Elian's relative's home in Miami and the reaction of the leftist controlled media condoning the trashing of our Constitution while demonizing the innocent victims make you wonder how much longer will this country be the land of the brave and the free.
Memory, Dqban22, memory. What happened to your memory? Good thing is: you don't bring up the Cold War BS that people always try to hide behind when they attempt to justify Uncle Sam's wholesale crimes.
Let's go down memory lane...
1. The invasion of vietnam...more than 2 million Vietnamiese killed 2. Secret bombing of Cambodia...half-a-million peasants dead as a direct result of the bombing 3. Iraq...(ongoing) over a million infants dead as a result of US-enforced sanctions 4. Indonesia...more than 200,000 East Timorese butchered to death, with Uncle Sam's consent (>80% of the arms supplied by Washington) 5. Guatamala...over 200,000 Mayan Indian peasants butchered to death by a US-installed, US-trained, and US-armed junta 6. Turkey...(ongoing) over 35,000 Kurds murdered (Kurds are not allowed to speak their own language). >70% of the arms procured from Washington 7. Chile...Uncle Sam engineered a coup that unseated a democratically-elected government and replaced it with a murderous dictator (Pinochet). 8. Ditto Iran... 8. Contra terrorists 9. El Salvador 10. Neo-nazis in Argentina 11. ...and so on
What makes it easy for uncle sam to stand up for good when he has such a bloody history (not forgetting this nation was founded on genocide), and continues to sponsor murderous regimes (because they prostrate their countries for American multinationals to do as they will), is the eighth wonder of the world.
If you're for human rights, then show some consistency because the lives of those who are murdered with Uncle Sam's consent (or, in some cases, by him directly) are not worth less than those of his enemy's victims
Dear veeman; you are absolutely right, the violations of human rights are repugnant it doesn't matter if the perpetrators are from the left or from the right. As Armando Valladares has said, "Man is Nature's most wonderful creature. Torturing him, crushing, murdering him for his beliefs and ideas is more than a violation of human rights- it is a crime against all humanity."
Certainly, the United States had its share of blame for many wrongs committed through history, as so have many other powerful nation through the ages.
But, please, do not rewrite History. The worst mass murder against humanity were committed by socialist/fascist regimes from Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, to Castro, with the complicity of leftist minded zealots infiltrated in the U.S. government, the academia and the media from Franklin D. Roosevelt to our days.
Have you forgotten the support of your comrades for the pact Stalin/Hitler that provoked the World War II and the invasion of Poland and Chekoslovakia? Have you forgotten the 50 millions murdered by the communists in the Soviet Union, the 70 millions murdered by Mao and his followers in China, the millions in Eastern Europe, the millions murdered by the North Vietnam communist hordes, and the millions executed by the communists Cambodia's "killing fields". Fidel Castro, the idol of the unrepentant left, has the worst record of crimes against humanity in the history of this hemisphere, and is one of the worst sponsors of international terrorism, a fact that has been recognized by all international human rights organizations. Castro has also been responsible, directly and indirectly, for thousands of the deaths in Central, South America and Africa.
Today, Argentina, Chile and Central American enjoy democratic elected governments in spite of the abuses against human rights committed by both sides during their struggle to keep their countries free from the communist yoke. Cuba after 41 years ruled by a murderous Stalinist tyrant still remains as a bloody relic of a discredited and bankrupted ideology with the support of our dead brain leftists.
hmm...interesting retort. You start off by raving against Castro for his human rights record, then when I counter by raising Uncle Sam's, you pull out your party pamphlet on the horrors committed by Chinese and Russian communists (zilch to do with Castro). So, am I to accuse America for the murder of 6 million Jews (using the argument that Germany was a capitalist country, or that American capitalists were supplying Hitler with war machinery)? See the asininity in your argument?
In a previous post, you made up numbers of Castro's victims, and I countered it with those of America's to show the gaping hole in your argument. By merely looking at the numbers (even after excluding Vietnam on the false pretense that it was a war), anyone who's not a fanatic jingoist would have been hesitant to level (against Castro) the worst human rights violation accusation, PARTICULARLY IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE.
Can you please detail Castro's human rights violations in Africa?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
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